Motoi Sauce is the creation of Michelin-starred chef Motoi Maeda — owner-chef of Restaurant MOTOÏ and MOTOI GYOZA, Kyoto. The sauce was born at the gyoza counter: Chef Maeda was developing a hot sauce to serve alongside gyoza for international guests when a Kyoto yuzu farmer reached out, looking for a buyer for a bumper harvest. Recognizing the opportunity, he built the sauce around the fruit, and Motoi Sauce was born.
The yuzu comes from Mizuo — the birthplace of yuzu cultivation in Japan, a remote mountain village outside Kyoto where farming families have grown yuzu for centuries. Today, aging growers and rural depopulation have put the region’s harvests under pressure. Chef Maeda buys directly from those farmers, using every piece of fruit — misshapen, undersized, or otherwise imperfect. Nothing is turned away. The sauce is, in part, a commitment to sustaining those farms.
Ayako, Umami Curator at The House of Umami, traveled to Mizuo with Chef Maeda and saw the harvest firsthand — the steep hillside orchards, the small crews working quickly through the short season, the boxes of fruit that wouldn’t make the grade anywhere else. She came back with a clear sense of what was at stake. Carrying Motoi Sauce is her answer to that.
She also visited the production kitchen in Kyoto — a small, meticulous operation where each bottle is filled by hand in a spotlessly clean workspace.
Whole yuzu — rind, pith, and fruit together — is processed into a paste that gives the sauce its viscosity and its aroma. No artificial thickeners are used; the body comes entirely from the fruit itself. Add rice vinegar for clean acidity and natural preservation. Chili is selected as much for umami depth as its heat, while soy sauce adds structure and length. Salt, minimal. Five ingredients, nothing more.
The fragrance releases on contact with warmth. A spoonful stirred into a pan sauce, a few drops over grilled fish, a dash through a nage at the last moment. It adapts to French, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese preparations with equal fluency.
